The writer and politician Mahmud al-Mis'adi is a figure of prime importance in the development of North African literature and cultural politics since the last war. This fascinating book covers both his essays and fiction, written between the 1930s and 1990s, which challenge the boundaries between the sacred and irreligious in the Islamic world. In addition, it also examines Arabic literature and its relationship to the West.

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood--the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public...

"The Wedding of Zein" unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih's tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic. Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that he will be getting married--Zein the freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless,...